AUGUST 2007

Ward Churchill Fired! UPDATE Interview below this article.

University of Colorado Set To Fire Ward Churchill

by Ira Chernus
Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado Indian-studies professor whose splenetic take on the 9/11 attacks has provoked belated storms of outrage from academia

Published on Friday, July 20, 2007
by CommonDreams.org
www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/20/2647

On Tuesday, July 24, the University of Colorado Board of Regents will decide whether to accept the recommendation of CU President (and former Republican senator) Hank Brown, and fire CU Professor Ward Churchill. It's not likely that Brown, one of the shrewdest (and most conservative) politicians Colorado has produced, would recommend the firing unless he was already sure the Regents would back him up. So it's a very good bet that the Regents will indeed give Churchill the axe. The only thing that might change their minds is an outpouring of public opinion supporting a professor's right to voice unpopular views.

The Regents' decision is not merely a local affair. It has enormous impact on the whole country. That gives you the right -- and the responsibility -- to let them know what you think. The chair of the University of Colorado Board of Regents is Patricia Hayes. You can write to her at: Patricia.Hayes@cu.edu.

Why should you bother? It's still a rare occasion when a tenured professor is fired because he is an outspoken leftist. But every time a witchhunt is successful, it encourages other right-wingers to go after their favorite target. It brings the next witchhunt closer and increases the odds that it will succeed.

I'm an outspoken leftie professor at the University of Colorado too, so I've got a personal stake in this. Someone once asked me to wear a big button that said, "I am Ward Churchill." I said I'd prefer a button reading, "I am Next." But you never know who will be next. There is nothing very special about Colorado. It can happen anywhere. The witchhunters may be coming to a campus near you. That's one reason the fate of Ward Churchill matters to you.

The visible fallout from the Churchill case -- the future attacks on leftist academics -- is only the tip of the iceberg. The bigger effect is one we'll never see or hear: the silence of all those, on and off campuses, who start censoring themselves, not speaking their minds completely and directly, avoiding controversial topics in their teaching and research, because they see which way the political wind blows.

Right after the 9/11 attack, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that people had better "watch what they say." That's the same message the CU Regents will send across the country by firing Churchill. The impact of this chilling effect is invisible and incalculable, but it is very real. And it will directly affect your freedom to hear the diversity of opinions, including the most radical opinions, that our ailing democracy needs so badly. That's another reason the fate of Ward Churchill matters to you, no matter where you live.

Of course the chilling wind would blow coldest across our college campuses. The quality of education in this country would take a blow. The efforts we profs make to engage students in critical thinking would be compromised as faculty avoid potentially damaging conflicts. The long-term trend toward turning colleges into vocational job training centers would get a boost. So would the powerful forces promoting what they call "politically neutral" indoctrination in Western culture and values.

Do we want our universities to graduate incurious and obedient functionaries rather than creative and bold leaders?

You may hesitate to weigh in on the case of the right wingers vs. Ward Churchill because you don't know the facts. After all, the faculty's Research Misconduct Committee produced a voluminous report detailing his supposed misconduct. It's the basis for firing Churchill.

Was the committee fair and accurate in its assessment? To be honest, I don't know. How could I? I'm not an expert in Native American Studies. I don't have the knowledge or experience to make an informed judgment. But neither did the committee, nor anyone else in the University bureacracy who has brought Churchill to the academic gallows. There were two experts in Native American Studies on the committee for a while, but they quit (some say they were hounded off) because they were trying to give the matter a fair hearing, and it seemed to them that was not what the committee had in mind.

So a professor is about to be axed for research misconduct even though no one with any expertise in his field has substantiated the charges. In fact a number of experts in Native American Studies who examined the committee's report found that it had numerous flaws and seemed to reflect the selective use of evidence to advance a predetermined objective. They found no evidence of gross errors, which is what "research misconduct" means, in Churchill's work.

To be sure, Churchill has his critics in his academic field. So do I. That's what academia is all about. But as Eric Cheyfitz of Cornell University, who closely studied the committee's report, wrote, it "turns what is a debate about controversial issues of identity and genocide in Indian studies into an indictment of one position in that debate." If you start firing professors because some of their colleagues don't like their research, most all of us would have to go. And if you take apart the work of a productive scholar, looking for every little flaw you can find (a misplaced citation here, a small misquote there), most all of us would have to go. But that's not research misconduct.

Churchill's scholarship as well as his politics has always been controversial. Critics charged for many years that he wasn't adhering strictly to all the academic rules. But CU officials ignored those charges for most of those years. (In fact they granted him tenure even though he did not have a Ph.D and his work was somewhat unconventional, because they wanted a star to show their commitment to diversity. Now they are using the same unconventionality to hound Churchill out
-- and raise grave questions about their concern for diversity.)

CU officials only became concerned about the quality of Churchill's work after right-wingers discovered his now-famous essay that called corporate functionaries working in the World Trade Center on 9/11 "little Eichmanns." That triggered an avalanche of conservative pressure on CU to fire Churchill. Of course the University administrators could not come out and say they were investigating him for unpopular political opinions in the post-9/11 era. So they got the Research Misconduct Committee to go through his writings with a fine-tooth comb. Lo and behold, they found the "evidence" they were looking for.

There's a lot more to the case. Charges of plagiarism rest on weak evidence and strained interpretations that don't withstand serious scrutiny. The University administrators broke their own system's rules in a number of ways. Most importantly, they let a massive campaign by outsiders -- conservatives from across the country -- influence what should be strictly an internal decision-making process.

It looks like President Hank Brown is catering to those outsiders. He has rejected his own faculty advisory committee's recommendation to discipline and suspend Churchill, opting instead to go for out-and-out firing.

The irony is that once the Regents do give Churchill the axe, he will go to court and argue that his contractual rights were violated. Both sides will trot out their experts. In the end, some judges who know nothing at all about Native American Studies will have to decide whether there is compelling evidence of research misconduct here. Since the whole case of the right wingers vs. Churchill rests on political animus, the outcome will probably depend on how conservative those judges are. If it ever reaches Supreme Court, we can unfortunately pretty well predict how it will go.

The last chance to stop that slide down the slippery legal slope is to convince the Regents that it's not in their best interests to fire Churchill. They need to know that the whole world is watching. They need to hear from you. Again, the chair of the Board of Regents is Patricia Hayes. You can write to her at: Patricia.Hayes@cu.edu. If you want email addresses for the other Regents, go to https://www.cu.edu/regents/RgntsPUB0101.html.

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 Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. Email: chernus@colorado.edu

AMY GOODMAN: The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado in Boulder voted 8-to-1 Tuesday evening to fire tenured professor of ethnic studies Ward Churchill on charges of research misconduct, they said. But Professor Churchill maintains the allegations were a pretext to remove him for his unpopular political views.

Churchill has written a number of books on genocide against Native Americans and the US government's COINTELPRO program -- that's Counter-Intelligence Program. After yesterday's verdict, Churchill said he planned to sue the university.

JUAN GONZALEZ: The controversy dates back to early 2005, when a college newspaper reprinted Churchill's three-year-old essay on the attacks on the World Trade Center. He described the attacks as a response to a long history of US abuses and called those who were killed on 9/11 as "little Eichmanns" who formed a "technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire."

Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi bureaucrat convicted for war crimes, who political theorist Hannah Arendt famously described as embodying the "banality of evil." Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly repeatedly attacked Churchill for his comparison. Soon after, Colorado Governor Bill Owens wrote a letter to the university calling for Churchill's resignation.

A special panel at the university immediately conducted an investigation into Churchill's comments. They concluded that he could not be fired for his statements, which were protected by the First Amendment. However, another panel later determined that Churchill plagiarized and fabricated material in his scholarship and recommended his dismissal.

AMY GOODMAN: Supporters of Ward Churchill organized a rally before the Regents delivered their decision to fire Churchill at 5:30 last night in Boulder. They had been deliberating behind closed doors all day.

Today we'll be joined by Ward Churchill on the phone from Boulder, but first to a clip of yesterday's rally. We turn now to Ward Churchill, his lawyer David Lane, American Indian Movement activist Glenn Morris, and one of Churchill's students.

ANN ERIKA WHITEBIRD: And the decision to fire Ward Churchill is really sad for me. He's the only professor that I've taken a class, where I really felt empowered as an Indigenous person. And our history, the history of genocide against our people, the history, the policy, the US policy of extermination against our people, the forced sterilization of our women -- that was found out as early as the '70s -- it was all something that Ward talks about in his books. So I'm not just talking about the class that he's offered, the FBI at Pine Ridge, but, you know, other classes that he teaches and then the books that he's written is really affirming as a Native person.

The history that we hear growing up about the smallpox blankets, it's not something that you question. It's something that is part of our oral history. And it's part of the history of other indigenous peoples. So when I'm here at CU Boulder and I talk to other students who are Dene or from other nations, it's a common understanding.

AMY GOODMAN: That was a student talking about Ward Churchill. Now, we turn to the ethnic studies professor, who joins us on the phone from his home in Boulder. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Ward Churchill.

WARD CHURCHILL: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Your thoughts today on the morning after your firing?

WARD CHURCHILL: Well, a period of glaciation, which was this process of creating the illusion of research misconduct to cover a firing for political speech, has come to an end. That process has now run its course, so there's a new phase that's begun, which is, I suppose, for lack of a better way of putting it, my period of defensive posture has come to an end and the offense has begun, kicks off this morning with the filing of a suit.

AMY GOODMAN: Who will you be suing?

WARD CHURCHILL: Regents of the University of Colorado for accepting, in full knowledge at this point, a non-scholarly sham of an investigative report, creating the pretext. And I say "non-scholarly" because the university has withdrawn the entire investigative report from any scholarly scrutiny. They refuse to allow it to be subject to scrutiny by competent scholars. And there are research misconduct complaints in place at this point against the members of the investigative committee for serial plagiarism, wholesale falsification, outright fabrication -- in other words, fraud. It's a fraudulent finding.

So there is no defensible scholarly conclusions that anything I've said in my writing is even inaccurate, much less fraudulent, or that I committed the so-called plagiarism. All they've got is public outrage in the form of very well-organized rightwing, active-style lobbying blocks, and the statements of public officials, and so on, saying I should be removed as the basis for removing me.

JUAN GONZALEZ: The amazing thing about this is that the so-called -- the investigation focused on everything but the apparent reason why there was such a determination to investigate you. The essay having to do with 9/11, that wasn't even a subject, supposedly, of this investigation, was it?

WARD CHURCHILL: No. And a point to be made there is that while I was a target, was a target that would serve as a sort of conduit, in a way, they considered me to be, and said so, considered me to be kind of at the forefront of a sort of critical line of analysis, historically speaking. And they wanted to roll back that line of analysis altogether, to discredit it, so that you basically have a return to that triumphalis, celebratory white-supremacist interpretation of American history with all of the denial and falsification that that is known to entail. That's the reason, in part. And it's in large part for the charade that they have acted out over the last two-and-a-half years, the going after the historical analysis, as well as a purveyor of it. And so, this goes way beyond me. I'm intended to symbolize the cost and consequence of challenging orthodoxy in certain critical domains, at least.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And what has been the response of the press in Colorado? Have any of the newspapers or any of the press defended your right to speak your mind?

WARD CHURCHILL: Well, yeah. They've created this false dichotomy, in a way: Well, it's reprehensible, we disagree with it, blah, blah, blah, but he had a right to say it, however repugnant it may have been. On the other hand, he did all these things that constitute research misconduct. Basically he's pedaling lies to the public that cause discontent with the status quo. And that's what the issue is. The specific acts of research misconduct has nothing to do with that speech.

The press was instrumental in framing that. There's been a symbiotic relationship between the administration at the university and the press all along. The press really took the lead in drumming up furor. There were 400 feature articles on my case, or what is supposed to be my case, in the Denver metro area newspapers in barely sixty days. Pope died; I had the front page of the Rocky Mountain News. The Rocky Mountain News was at the very forefront of creating the appearance that there was scholarly impropriety involved in my work and to be able to separate that set of issues then, the scholarly impropriety from the speech issues.

AMY GOODMAN: Ward Churchill, we have to go. But in addition to the lawsuit you're filing, what are your plans now?

WARD CHURCHILL: Well, my plans now are to continue to do what it is that I've always done: I mean, being a professor at the University of Colorado hardly defines the nature of my life. In fact --

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to have to leave it there. I want to thank you for being with us from Boulder, Ward Churchill, just fired by the University of Colorado.[newprofile message1310] Professor Ward Churchill fired, vows to sue Democracy Now!